Boy meets Tel Aviv

Blackberry on the beach. Struck me as so Tel Aviv-cliché, and so anti-Tel Aviv in the same time..

You sit in your regular café, sipping your ‘afouch’ - cappuccino - and absent-mindedly watch people pass by, parents walking their baby, and the other people sipping other cappuccinos in the café across the street.

Then you are told that, because of a wave of bombings in the city, you are no longer allowed to sit by the window of the café because it’s too dangerous.

If, after a few months of resignation, you decide that no goddamn bomb will deprive you from your afouch and decide to brave the ban to sit by the window - such an act of rebellion! - then congratulations: you are a real Tel Avivian.

I know this intro will be surprising to many - those who agree or disagree with me alike. But attempting to comprehend this state of mind is unavoidable, to hopefully grasp the essence of the Tel Aviv that hides beyond the beach bars. The ephemeral normalcy that, like a pendulum, we brush against but never halt; but never stop trying either. Tel Aviv has a 'cautious lust for life', in a sense, enjoying it while it lasts but it somehow foresees it won't.

You there yet?

Bartender at café Tachtit

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Tel Aviv is to Israelis what Ramallah is to Palestinians: a self-sufficient bubble which would be more than glad to severe ties with the madness outside.
It seldom can, though. Reality, not unlike death, always catches up. Badly.


It’s the Israel that is not on the news. The one I did not know existed and thought was only in the imagination - and on the blogs - of the most optimistic of observers of this country.

Never far enough from the Occupation, of course, but with enough detachment to view things with a clarity unavailable when you walk, daily, in a checkpoint metal cage and past disagreeable soldiers barking at you in Russo-Hebrew, or walk past a chap with extra-long and curly sideburns in a black dressing gown (or when you ARE one) on a street of Jerusalem.

It’s far from perfect, of course. But in the given circumstances, it’s as close as it’s going to get. In a different world, I could live there.

There is so much to tell about Tel Aviv, so many interesting photos to post that I think that Tel Aviv 101 deserves its own little series.
I'll post photos soon. And if I start to sound like a tour guide - stop me!